Cycles Smoke render - Extremely poor performance & crashes
OK, just for reference, I found the problem - it was the Volumes settings!

I had them at the default of Step Size: 0.1 &amp; Max Steps: 1024

It was killing my machine at this setting.

So I changed it to Step Size: 5 &amp; Max Steps: 16 and it's MUCH better now! Only a very small noticeable difference in smoke quality too.